Zombies are a first world problem

If you’ve spent any significant amount of time with me or, say, happened to take me to see Sean of the Dead, you will know that I am terrified of zombies.  This terror is completely unwarranted, I know, but it has still led me to create numerous escape and refuge plans in case there ever is a zombie invasion in Davis (mostly they involve the primate center).  Since being in Kenya though, the threat of zombies is really diminished, and I have other things to worry about.  Like lions roaring less than a kilometer away from our research center (probably over a kill), or the lion perched on top of the quarry about 500 meters away from the path I use to do my chimp observations.  Kim hasn’t been helping the situation, she’s been jumpy as a newborn lamb at every little noise lately.  Mostly, it’s the water dripping in the shower or the tree brushing the tin roof, but every once in a while there’s the crunch of gravel when a waterbuck walks by, or the weird sound of a zebra getting nervous and alarm barking at, well, anything (I have to remind myself that zebras are like horses, and therefore pretty dumb when it comes to fear), and the other night we heard a zebra galloping down the road that goes to the airstrip.  So walking from my banda to the bathrooms to brush my teeth at night has been an interesting adventure, filled with quick sprints to my door to avoid whatever may be lurking in the dark.

Ultimately, the research center is actually really safe.  We’re one corner of a square that includes the main offices (which are always manned), Ol Pejeta House (a really nice and expensive hotel), and the staff camp, all of which are pretty much always occupied.  Additionally, there’s an electric fence around the entire compound that gets put up at night to prevent the larger of our potential visitors (elephants, rhinos, etc.) from visiting, and Gorbachov the blind elephant has been translocated to a new area.  When it’s swarming with people while Earthwatch is here, and when I will be living in my tent, I will be doubly safe, as most predators have no interest in going near a camp filled with rowdy Americans on vacation.

It’s actually a little hard to remember that I’m in Kenya, doing field work, which I’ve been looking forward to all year.  My life very quickly took on a routine that involves walking, sweating, and writing down things about chimps.  The quiet of the research center, punctuated only by little birds and the generator at Ol Pejeta House, has been a bustle of activity as it is being renovated in an attempt to fix it up before the first Earthwatch group gets here.  The young chimp house is also a bustle of activity, as a new house is being built for them and any future chimps that might arrive at the sanctuary.  Construction in Kenya doesn’t seem to be too much different from construction in the US though: it moves painfully slowly and is never ready when you need it to be.

Last Sunday we had to chance to watch an elephant darting and translocation.  Alli has the best luck ever in Kenya and she’s seen lions five or six times, cheetahs almost the same number of times, as well as a bat eared fox, patas monkeys, and the rest.  I take Sundays off because they are really busy for the chimp caregivers, and I don’t want to ask them to take time out of their day to follow me around, so I get to stick around the research centre and do data entry or go out with Kim hunting for giraffe.  We were just leaving the Kamok petrol station when we saw a plane, a ginormous truck, and a couple of the elephant trackers hanging out with a large elephant on the airstrip.  The KWS vets darted Gorbachov on foot and after running around frenetically for about 15 minutes he just dropped like a stone.  He took about two drunk steps before that happened – his right hind went wide and then came back under him, and then he collapsed on the forehand.

After he was down the KWS vets sawed off his tusks using a chainsaw, then applied a moisturizer-ish thing to prevent them from cracking.  They took some samples, and we got to touch him, but mostly the point of this job was moving him to a new area.  He’s been quite the pest lately, breaking out of his new confines in search of greener pastures, which is why they took his tusks off.  I pulled a tick off his ear which was alarmingly large, and then killed it because it was gross, and blood spattered all over my shoe.  Getting him onto the truck was quite the ordeal, but the KWS vets were surprisingly tender with him, gently laying one of his ears flat under his body so it wouldn’t be folded over under his weight, and carefully strapping him down so he wouldn’t fall off the truck, all while holding open his trunk so he could breathe.  I imagine that is the last we will see of Gorbachov for quite some time, as he’s been moved to a fenced in area far on the edge of the conservancy, for both his safety and that of others.

This week I have also had the great joy of dealing with car issues, when the rental car wouldn’t start one morning.  It turns out the entire battery had to be replaced, which was awesome.  It lost me a day of data collection, but I did get to go out with Kim and Alli later that afternoon and we finally saw LIONS!  They were adorable, two cubs lying with their mother.  The lioness was quite far from them, and apparently has been making them stay away from her lately, but the cubs were all over one another, licking and nuzzling and yawning and all kinds of awesome.  We’ve also seen a ton of giraffe, including a couple licking the ground, although I couldn’t tell you why.  When I encountered these fellows I was driving along a road and they didn’t scatter the way giraffe usually do when someone drives up, so I was about 15 feet from one of them as he stared in my windshield.  Being used to nasty roos, I was quite wary of his potential to destroy the front of my car, but after staring at us a bit he eventually walked off.

Alley pours dirt on Ajabu

My days with the chimps have been awesome.  Data collection is movcing along nicely, and by that I mean that I could plausibly use some of the data I’ve collected in the last week.  It hasn’t taken me long at all to learn to recognize the chimps, most of them are pretty distinctive, and even I’ve been surprised with my progress.  They are so much more playful than their zoo-housed counterparts, probably because they have a few youngsters amongst them (3-, 6-, and 7-year-olds) who are constantly active and playing.  Ajabu, the youngest at 3, is a typical child: whenever her mother and grandmother lie down for a nap you can see her sitting there, bored with them, and wondering who she can pester to play with her.  Everyone loves to play with Ajabu, and she happily roughhouses with even the biggest males.

Victoria is one of the most playful chimps everrrr

In the other group of chimps, Jane has been happily chasing baboons and warthogs around.  In the mornings, the warthogs and baboons come up to the chimps’ breakfast area and start harassing them to share their breakfast.  Most of the chimps move away from the warthogs, but the hogs are quite brave and will walk right up to a chimp to try to sneak food out of their lap.  This has resulted in a few screams and attacks on the warthogs, as simple threats and displays don’t seem to do anything.  The baboons are even bolder, and Jane chased them around for quite a while until they realized that she wasn’t actually going to hit them.  Then they chased her back, and when one of them managed to grab her she screamed so loudly that at least three other chimps left their breakfasts and came to her rescue.  I’ve been told that the chimps really dislike the baboons, and when truly fed up with them two of the high ranking males have thrown baboons into the electric fence.

Today is a Sunday, so I get to go out with Kim again and hopefully get to take advantage of the last of Alli’s good luck.  

put your troubles in a little pile

Kenya will sort them out for you.

This last week in Nairobi has been great; I've made new friends, gotten to travel around the city a bit and have "young people" fun, as well as rest, relax, and get some work done.

I spent Tuesday around the house with Joyce, and we made dinner together for the family, all of which would be joining us that evening.  After seeing Alli off in the morning I was a bit sad that I wasn't going to get up to Ol Pejeta too, but managed to console myself cooking rabbit and a quick cake with Joyce.  Dinner was great fun, I've definitely learned a lot by listening to NPR and being aware of the world around me, so I was able to contribute to the conversation more than occasionally.  Kiuri tried to explain his philosophy of why he doesn't eat eggs, which has to do with trauma and the prevention of a potential life which I didn't quite understand, but made a valiant effort.

Wednesday was an excellent yet unproductive day.  After having breakfast with Kiuri after his morning yoga, I hung out in my room and read for quite a while. I kept promising myself that at the end of that chapter I would put my book down and get to work, but never did that happen. Around 12:30 Kiuri showed up asking if I wanted to get some lunch in Westlands, and I happily accompanied him.  We went to a local buffet restaurant where I was served all together too much food -- mokemo, a green-banana dish that I love, and a variety of lentils and beans, chapati, and soukuma.  We chatted while I ate happily with my hands, and talked about Kenyan culture, which I am always happy to learn about.  Kiuri also educated me on the subject of Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, which was playing above us on television.  The film moved incredibly slowly, Kiuri claims it moves in real time, but has never really watched all of one.

After lunch Kiuri and I ran some errands in Westlands including heading to a print shop that also makes tee-shirt prints, and then somewhere he could get some real blueprints made.  We discussed the many intricacies of matatu culture and driving, including the high-paced lives of the Matatu Touts.  These men are the ones that hang onto the side of each matatu and try to convince you to ride that particular matatu on that particular line. The differences matatus boast are entertainment systems -- some even have dvd players in the back in addition to cds -- interior decor, and of course the personality of the tout.  Furthermore, the touts are treated like rock stars in their local communities, and often are inextricable with the drug scene.  Matatus, despite my original expectations, are owned by many different cartels (Kiuri's word, not necessarily what I would have chosen) and many different matatus will run on the same line, thus requiring the touts to convince willing or unwilling passengers to get onto the matatu.  It's a crazy business, and we watched some Matatus Behaving Badly outside the printshop as we waiting.

After arriving back to Joyce's I was promptly picked up by Keni, a friend of Kiuri's who is closer to my age and knows a lot of younger people around the city.  I ran some quick errands with him, including picking up some wine for his sister's birthday (Nana of previous lore), and dropping said bottle off at his house. He has a family cat, Socks, who had five two-week-old kittens for me to be enamored of.  Pretty incredibly adorable, and Socks was very tolerant of us picking up the babies and playing with them.  The kittens were not so impressed.  Then we headed to Zen Garden, a nearby restaurant and gardens, for some cocktails and pizza.  Keni told me about his masters thesis on the world food crisis, and I was pretty enthralled.  There are a lot of aspects of many agricultural businesses that I knew nothing about, and considering my background in agriculture and ranching, should probably educate myself on.

From Zen Gardens we headed to Abyssinia, an Ethiopian restaurant for more wine.  We were shortly joined by a huge group of American tourists who were loud and very entertaining for us.  I felt that I was superior to their general tourism by being a researcher, and Keni agreed that I was at least superior in that I was hanging out with a Kenyan.  After Abyssinia we met two friends of his at a bistro for some dinner, both of them French women who work in very similar positions at different branches/versions of world banks.  We had a great time discussing French wine tasters' unnecessarily fussy tastes, our jobs in general, and some mind bender/con artist-ish guy named Darren Brown, who Keni swears can subliminally message people into anything.  We weren't so sure, but were promised links.

Thursday was another relaxing day as I did some laundry, finished up some cleaning and errands, and got ready to leave Friday morning.

This morning dawned clear and bright, and I woke up early but relaxed in bed until around 8 before getting up.  Everything was packed already, so I simply had some breakfast and a chat with Kiuri again, and got ready to go.  I was picked up by my driver, Evans, at 10:00 and we shortly had the car loaded with my tent, cot, and bags and were on the road.  The drive to Ol Pejeta was beautiful, as usual, and not as long as I had expected; we arrived in just three short hours.  Kim met us at the Nakumatt shortly with Alli and Jenny and we headed into town to get some groceries for me to contribute to our general food and run errands.  Jenny headed to a hardware store (chains she wanted and chained she got, I don't work there any more), Kim got her spare tire fixed from a puncture, and I practiced driving on the right -- aka the LEFT -- side of the road.  I only got left behind a few times, and even then I could navigate fairly well.  We stopped at some curio shops that Kim frequently goes to, and Alli got a giraffe sculpture and some antelope.  I picked up two pair of earrings and a beautiful zebra kanga (kind of a skirt-like-thing that women here wear) and nothing else. I promised the various store owners there that I would be back and there for many months so they needn't be pushy, but there were a few things I was interested in buying.  I will have to figure out the best way to bargain and play my hands right so I can get the best deals while there (although I didn't get at all ripped off on my earrings today; 250 /- for 2 pair, less than $5).

After around three hours of errands we headed back to Ol Pej and Jenny led the way while I drove. Kim drove much faster and ahead.  At the gate, I was happily shown through as the research coordinator had warned the gate staff of my arrival.  We got to the research center and after putting my things in my room I sat down for a cup of tea and was happily greeted by David!  David is one of the supervisors of the chimp sanctuary and was Brenda's and my main guide when we were in Sweetwaters last time.  He is incredibly friendly, knowledgeable, and generally happy.  It really lifted my spirits that he was happy to see me, as I was a little sad that I was leaving Nairobi where I had had so much fun.  Not that I wasn't happy to be in Ol Pejeta again, just that I had a few lingering fears about my work here (will it work? will they hate me? will I fall in the river and get chomped by hippos? will a chimp drag me into an electric fence?).  I asked David if he had any updates for me about the chimps, and he told me that there was a surprise.  I asked what it was, but he was pretty close-lipped.  Then he sneakily discussed this something in Swahili with Kim, mocked me for my lack of Swahili (telling me that I would have to learn more!), wouldn't tell me any more, and departed smiling.  I will see him tomorrow, though.

George arrived with some other Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) vets later, and was also quite happy to see me.  He thanked me for the computer, and stayed for dinner.  We had some great discussion about the chimps and their health checks and naming in Kenya.  It was great to see the fun, non-working side of George.

Alli, Kim, and I had good talks late into the evening, and here I am, updating you now.

So basically, Ol Pejeta is awesome and I am glad I am here again.  Once again, no pictures: I was driving today, and could hardly be expected to take pictures as well!  Additionally my internet works quite well, and that makes me really happy, because it means I can keep updating and adding pictures.

Getting on the road today and up to my field site has done wonders for my mental state, and I'm no longer totally worried about my permits or progress or potential failure or that I might not see any animals other than chimps and how that would really be a bit sad.  Thank you, Kenya, for that peace of mind.

Nairobi

Joyce and George have a beautiful house, situated in the hilly part of West Nairobi, in the UN area of Mutheiga.  They have a vegetable garden and keep rabbits and chickens for meat and eggs. I have my own room in the house with a very comfortable bed, my own bathroom, and it is very quiet.  When I turn the lights off to go to sleep, it's basically pitch black, which is also really nice.  Last night I slept like a champ, only woke up once at 4 in the morning, and promptly went back to sleep until around 8.

After I got up I had a sweet potato and spinach for breakfast, which Joyce told me when she came downstairs to join me was a pretty traditional breakfast.  In this house, they eat a lot of traditional foods so I will become quite accustomed with real Kenyan food.  After chatting over tea and breakfast, we decided what we would do today: go to the Sarit Centre for Joyce's eye appointment, and so I could get a phone, modem, and explore the area a bit.

It was so much easier to get a phone than I ever anticipated.  Joyce called her son to ask for a recommendation of the best company for me in Nanyuki, and he said Airtel. Airtel was conveniently on the bottom floor of the Sarit center, so I walked in, asked for a phone and a modem, and 30 minutes later both were up and running.  All I have to do to add minutes/mb is buy them at any store and then add them to my phone or modem using a secret pin provided on the purchase card!  It's so simple.  A modem, by the way, is not what we typically think of as a modem in the US or Australia, it's a 3G access point and is like a big thumb drive that plugs directly into your computer to give you access to the internet.  You are charged by the mb of upload/download, and you can bundle your charges to get the best deals.  For example, right now I'm paying 300 bob (about USD$3.50) for unlimited internet for 7 days.  Since I've got a lot of emailing to do this week, I consider that a pretty good deal.  When I get out to Ol Pejeta I'll probably dial back to a 1 or 2 GB plan and hope that lasts me the summer.

In the afternoon we headed over to Joyce's apartment complex (that she built) so she could pay some repairmen and I could meet two of her three children, Kiuri and Wambui.  We imposed on Kiuri for a cup of tea, since I am trying to kick coffee, and chatted for a while.  I have been enjoying my adventures around Nairobi, although they aren't too adventuresome as yet -- I haven't gone out on my own as I don't know the area that well.  However, I imagine I might be ready to in a few more days.

Sunday was relaxing and pleasant, I had a mellow morning on the internet and reading and then had tea with Joyce on their patio after lunch.  The patio has spectacular views as it looks down the hill on a forested ravine and there are only a few roofs to be seen, even though houses do exist down that way.  I had thought I heard monkeys on my first night here but brushed it off to a foreign bird call, however Joyce corrected me and told me that monkeys do come here.  Sykes monkeys (Cercopithecus albogularis) probably, as they are what I saw later this week in Karen, but I am not sure.  Apparently they run into the chicken coop and steal the eggs and often make off with the vegetables from the garden.  If I were a monkey, I'd want to come to this garden too!

I was picked up by surprise on Sunday late afternoon by Nana (Nah-nah, not nanna like grandma), one of Wambui's friends.  We met up with two more of her friends and Wambui and went to Solar Garden, a nyama choma restaurant and bar, for some drinks and some choma (fire roasted meat).  Nana, Wambui, and their friends were very easy to talk to, much easier than some of the other friends-of-friends I have met with in the past, and were happy to explain all about the area and geography to me as we drove around.  All around the Westlands areas flats (apartment buildings) are popping up on old house properties and this is causing all kinds of trouble with electricity and water as there is not the infrastructure to support that amount of residence.  Water lines are a particular problem as the lines on these estates were often only laid down for a single house with 8-10 residents, and without re-doing the water lines apartment complexes are springing up on top of them.  One of the girls we were with has to collect and store water once a week when the water comes on in her apartment and hope that it lasts her until the next time the water comes on.  Additionally, the electricity goes out almost every time there is rain (this I truly do not understand), either in a transitory way, rolling brownouts, or just overall blackouts.  This area of Nairobi is really cute, and I very much enjoyed driving around there, but I don't know that I'm cut out to store my water up for a week at a time.  I am told that it's all a matter of becoming used to it, though.

Nana also helped dispell the thought in me that all Kenyan drivers are completely nuts.  My ride from the airport to the house had me pressing on the passenger side break (aka the floor) constantly, and even my trip with Joyce was a little scary as the area around Sarit was very busy and filled with drivers. Nana explained that mostly it was the Matatus Behaving Badly (new show idea, obviously) as they are so obsessed with getting the next fare that they will do anything to get there quickly, including constantly cutting people off and driving on the side of the road. Furthermore, I think most of them do not care if their vehicles are scratched so it's a very low-risk-high-reward situation for them. Nana was a much more relaxed driver, happy to go with the flow and not worried about getting to our destination Right Now Now Now.

Despite this, I still managed to have a stress dream about driving after all that driving around in Nairobi. In my dream I was backing my subaru out of a parking space with a slight uphill incline (I was going backwards and uphill) and I noticed someone behind me so tried to brake. I pressed on the brake with both of my feet and literally leaned all of my weight into the brake and still my car didn't stop rolling backwards, and I dented another car.  I was horrified.  Then I woke up, thank goodness.

Monday was a real adventure and exercise in bureaucracy.  I had planned with Edwin to go to the Institute of Primate Research (IPR) in Karen (a suburb named after Baroness Karen von Blixen, a realisation that has led me to two things: I want a suburb named after me, and I want to change my name to "von Blixen").  IPR is the institution that I am affiliating with to get my research permits, and I have been communicating with one of the researchers there over the last few months to prepare my application.  I had emailed him on Wednesday to ask if I could come in on Monday morning and he emailed back with the affirmative, stating that he might be out of town in Arusha at a conference but he would forward my information to a few of his colleagues so they would be able to assist me when I arrived.  Well, I arrived, and all of the colleagues he had given my information to were either out of town or unfamiliar with my case and my needs.  One man, Danson, kindly made several phone calls to determine what needed to be done to help me, only to find out that the people who were needed to sign my paperwork were also out of the institute that day.

I decided to stick it out and waited in Danson's office for two hours to see if anyone would come back to sign my forms.  On our way to lunch we encountered one of Danson's colleagues in a parking lot and, as seems always to happen in Kenya, Danson immediately introduced me.  I didn't catch the other man's name, but he asked where I was from, and when I said "California" (I never answer "The US," always California, curiously), he said "Oh, California Davis? The University of California Davis?"  I was immediately shocked as most people have never heard of Davis, but evidently a close colleague of his had travelled to Davis to do his PhD and liked it so much he never came back!  Danson kindly bought me lunch, ugali and beef stew which was really quite good, and then we headed down to registration to see what could be done.  In registration, a kindly secretary helped me out and told me to leave my forms on the appropriate desk and she would make sure they were signed, the letter of affiliation written, and handed in to the ministry.  I thanked her heartily, gave her my phone number so she could call me once this was all done, and left.

Danson was very apologetic that the day had not been more successful, but I said it wasn't a big deal.  I had fortunately thought up a plan-B in case something like this happened and now I will be enacting it.  We exchanged email information so we can keep in contact, as he is interested in traveling to the US and getting a PhD there.  One huge upside to the day was getting to see Sykes monkeys, as they foraged on the ground around IPR and played around in the trees on the pathway. At one point I was walking with my backpack, which contained my camera, outside some lab buildings and heard a huge rustling to my left. I immediately looked and saw a large monkey about two arm lengths away from me.  I would have whipped out my camera to take a photo, but as IPR is a biomedical research facility they would probably not have appreciated the presence of my camera.  (By the way, their primate center is in a forest and way more beautiful than ours. It still smelled of monkey, but I couldn't see them for all the trees, although I could hear the male baboons grunting away from across the property where their enclosures were.)

All in all the day was not unsuccessful, and I have an email in to the institute now so hopefully my application will be processed shortly.  Plan B involves heading up to Ol Pejeta this Friday morning with the rental car, and bringing all my things with me.  While I am there I will do no official research, just getting to know the chimps and using Alli's expertise to make sure my methods are sound and will work out.   Of course, getting my permits couldn't be easy, so whatever.  It'll happen, I'll just light a fire under their tails with my frequent phone calls and emails.  Or be really polite. Either way.

Then yesterday evening I picked up Alli from the airport, though her plane was substantially delayed.  It gave me a lot of time to think things over about my own travels.  It was originally one of my undergrads who put me onto the idea of using tampons to deter bag searching.  He told me a story of a friend's mother who used to bring bird specimens back from the field illegally, and hid them in socks (or something) that she then sprinkled tampons around.  My own trunk, full of Kim's research supplies, I had packed full of socks, underwear, books, and then dumped a whole box of tampons on top of and I'm pretty sure nobody looked in it more than cursorily.  I fully attribute that my success in sneaking those supplies out to that.

And finally, I've been getting rather an annoying number of phone calls from the 530 area code of late. I'm sure it's important and I don't want to know about it and have turned off my US cell phone to avoid incurring charges.  So, friends, if you need to call me, for love or an emergency, please do so to my Kenyan phone number:

+254 787 611 455

Kenya is 10 hours ahead of California, so just keep that in mind.

Leaving on a jet plane

This trip to Kenya has been pretty good so far.  I had an incredibly long flight from San Francisco to Dubai, but managed to sleep almost the entire way there.  Of the 15 hours I managed to sleep for about 8, which is pretty good, even for me.  I arrived in Dubai around 7:30 and managed to get through immigration incredibly quickly.  I just checked in with customer service to arrange a hotel room to stay in for the night and asked about a visa application and was told I didn't need one at all.  So I just waltzed right through immigrations -- didn't fill out any forms or anything, although I had nothing to declare anyway -- and just went on out to my hotel.  My hotel room is all adorned in purple -- literally, all purple.

Dubai is hot as anything I have ever experienced.  We're pretty close to the equator here, and being right on the ocean I am not surprised that it is also really, really humid.  I am hoping to go on a tour tomorrow, but haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to get to a tour since most of them get back to the airport after I need to check in for my flight.  I might just visit one or two tourist spots in a cab and leave my possessions with the hotel staff before I go, but I am still a bit undecided.  I also have to get cash if I intend to do that, so we'll see how it all goes.

==========================================

So the Dubai stopover was a total flop in terms of sightseeing, but generally a really pleasant experience.  Let me explain.

I woke up around 5 AM Dubai time on Friday morning.  I had slept almost the entire flight to Dubai so I was, understandably, not exactly in it for a long haul night time sleep.  So what I had was a lot of lying around in the dark broken up in the middle by a 4 hour nap, and then I called it quits and started reading and tooling around on the internet again.  After biting off all my nails, and doing some pretty serious damage to my cuticles, then making a resolution (which I promptly broke five hours later in the Dubai airport) to have this Kenya trip be the Once and For All that I would stop biting my fingernails, I got on the internet and tried to figure out what to do with my morning. I investigated the Dubai metro to the Ibn Butatta mall; it looked pretty easy and Vivek said it was cheap, so I  tried to run with it.

Only, as the counter staff at the hotel I was staying at told me, because it was a Friday and a holiday the mall would be closing at 1 and the metro didn't open until 2. Well damn.  I asked about other options and was told that for 300 UED I could get a car tour of the city, but since that was nearly $100 USD (and would be after tip) I decided to try my luck with the "Big Bus Tours" that I had read about which could be booked from the airport. (It was after 5 AM at this point, I had showered, tooled around on the internet, "watched" Josie and the Pussycats while I got ready to leave, and checked out.)  Upon arriving at the airport, however, the desk that organized the Big Bus Tours was also closed, and I couldn't find any other tour desks in the departures terminal.  At that point, I decided to give up on my quest, get a cheap breakfast, and just head on through to the famed departures terminal to await my flight.

I read for the next 7 hours, bit my fingernails as previously mentioned, got my last coffee and burger for the next three months, and boarded my plane around 2:40.  The flight to Nairobi was very smooth and I almost managed to stay awake the whole time.  Since I had stuffed myself -- and given myself a bit of a stomach ache actually -- immediately before my flight with some BK (I was tempted to order The Royale so I could feel like John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson had given me some direct advice, but went with a smaller, cheaper burger, and boy was it a good choice) so didn't really eat much of my inflight meal, although it was quite good.  I watched I Am Number Four and the first 2/3 of Jerry Maguire (the only 2/3 I think I've ever seen, I even woke up for "you had me at hello" and realized that I knew nothing about that speech except for RZ's response) and then napped for a bit since there was too much cloud cover to see any of Africa sailing away below me.  The boy sitting next to me got dumped with all of his family's immigration forms to filled out, and the guy on the other side of him helped him out while I snoozed away.

Upon arrival in Nairobi all of my anxiety from Wednesday had departed me.  I was here, I had made it, from my previous experience it could only be smooth sailing from here to Ol Pejeta.  The first hiccup in that logic came when the guy at Immigration decided it was his personal duty to protect Kenya from my wallaby antics and grilled me for a good 10 minutes about why I was coming to Kenya for a 3 month vacation.  He asked what I was doing there, how long I stayed last time, what was I doing there again?, how long I was staying -- "Really? (growly voice and eyebrows raised) A three month vacation?" "Um, yes, I like animals. (and I'm an overly entitled American brat and can spend three months of my life mucking around in another country; didn't say that, obviously)" -- and then he demanded to see my return ticket, which I promptly showed him, and then he grumpily stamped my passport and waved me on.

Baggage claim was where the anxiety really started to hit me.  There were a lot of people on my flight so I didn't expect my luggage to come out too quickly, and I got a good spot by the baggage carousel that wasn't too crowded, but after my trunk came out and I waited another 15 minutes for my blue camo bag I got more worried.  What if someone saw its magnificence and had stolen it?  What if they had confiscated it because of all the jam and sriracha I had shoved in there?  What if they took George's computer charger, or my bird ID book, or my swahili book, or my binos?!  Then it arrived and I felt better.

I left baggage claim and promptly lied to the woman at customs ("What's in the trunk?" "Um... chairs, books, clothes, socks, tampons--" "Okay you can go." not listed: tongue depressors [wtf Kim?!], e-coli food, poop vials...), and found my driver, Edwin, waiting right outside baggage claim with a sign with my name on it.  I grabbed some cash out of the ATM, and Edwin showed me where to wait for him while he brought his car around to drive me to Joyce's house.  While I was waiting, the anxiety dropped back into the pit of my stomach.  I was literally so anxious I thought I could vomit if someone had handed me a trash can, and I leaned on my luggage nervously and guarded my twenty thousand shillings (check the conversion rate, it's not that much money), passport, and greencard like a tired, cranky dragon leaning on its pile of gold.  Then I got hit on.  Or cased for abduction; not sure.

A guy who I'd seen sitting across the road smoking with some other men walked up to me.  After he said hello I immediately rebuffed him with "I have a driver, thanks."
"Oh no, I just wanted to say 'hello'" he told me.
"Oh well, hello."
"I'm just here to pick up a friend who is flying in from Dubai."
At this point I was thinking "well that's very nice, and I'm going to keep one hand on each of my purse and backpack and one eye on the two cops around me so that when your friend comes up and tries to steal me things I can scream and nut you."  We made some idle chatter -- for less than a minute, and all I remember is that it involved Australia but not that I was doing research, as the vomit-ready feeling in the pit of my stomach was slowly but steadily deepening -- and finally he said something along the lines of "So if you want to hang out sometime, you should call me."
"I'm not going to be in Nairobi for very long," I told him.
"Oh, are you going on safari?" he asked.
"Yes, up around Laikipia."
"Oh well I'm doing a job in Nakuru next week. You should call me if you're there."
"Look," I told him, "I'm going to be really busy. I don't really have time to just... hang out."
"Well if you need anything, directions or advice or anything, just call or text me."
"I'm okay, really."
"Just take my number, it's good to have someone's number in Nairobi just in case, and if you need anything just call or text me."
Finally I relented and busted out my notebook to write down his number.  He hadn't asked for my name at this point so I introduced myself and go his name, although he was perfectly happy to offer me his name without getting mine. (Perhaps it makes you feel less towards your abduction victims, not knowing their name.)

About a minute later he came loping back over, told me that his friend had arrived and that he was leaving, and impressed upon me again to just call him or text him. For whatever.

It was weird and sketchy, I will admit it.  Fortunately I was under a bright light, there was a steady trickle of airport traffic around us including plenty of white people who probably would have objected had a young white woman started shrieking at the top of her ample, swimmer's lungs, and taxi drivers, and even a couple of cops, so I felt pretty safe at the time.  Since I didn't give him any details or my number and I'm pretty sure you can't implant a gps unit in someone by shaking their hand, I think I'm safe.

Edwin arrived about a minute later and we took an arduous 2 hour drive to the house I am staying at in Mutheiga.  No disrespect to Edwin, as he got me here safe and sound and in one piece, but he is a super aggressive driver! I cannot think of one time that we were in a merging or sketchy situation where he let someone else go first, even if I perceived them as being in the right in that situation.  Of course, I said nothing about it, and we chatted amiably about traffic, giraffe and zebra that he often sees by the airport, and traffic.  At Joyce's house we were greeted by two adorable but loud dogs that let me know I was a Stranger, and Joyce came out to give me a big hug as soon as she knew we had arrived.

Joyce is a long time family friend of Christian's grandparents from when they worked in the UN together, and thanks to them I have a place to stay in Nairobi, for which I am very grateful (Thanks Chris and Judy!)  After I had put my bags in my room and been given a brief tour of the house, Joyce and her husband George had tea with me and asked me all about my research, my plans for Kenya and Nairobi, and other subjects including the economy, petrol (gasoline) prices, and instability in the Middle East (now I must thank NPR for educating me on those subjects).

All in all, it's been a fairly pleasant travel experience, and I actually have some travel advice to give out from it.  So here we go: the first in what is most likely going to be a series of about one.

Travel Advice for Dubai and Kenya
- Do fly Emirates. I've traveled on a lot of airlines in my time and they go above and beyond to make your flight a pleasant experience.  I even spoke with one of their Melbourne supervisors, as he rode the shuttle with me from the hotel to the airport, and he said that the "luxury experience" is what they pride themselves on to set themselves apart.  The food was good, the seats reclined more comfortably than the Cathay Pacific ones (the next leading airline in my list of Really Nice Airlines) but less obnoxiously for space than most American airlines, they'll give you up to four bottles of wine in a flight (baby bottles, but that's still enough to do some damage), the flight attendants are still all really pretty and not jaded, they're incredibly helpful, and the ceiling has stars when it becomes night time.  If you're a vegetarian or are inclined to want a vegetarian order, do order your veg meal ahead of time because with all the people with food restrictions that fly emirates (they are a Middle-East based company) you are not going to get the spinach ravioli in a creamy tangy chunky tomato sauce if you don't ask in advance.
- Do plan a long layover in Dubai, it's incredibly easy to get through immigration with an American or Australian passport as you don't even need to apply for a visa or fill out a customs declaration. You can have your airline book your luggage right through to your final destination if you can pack some overnight gear (for me: an extra shirt and some underwear, toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush) in your carry on.  You can book an inexpensive hotel room and meal package (just breakfast, in the airport) right before you walk through immigration, and they give you tons of options: from the Holiday Inn Express to five star hotels further from the airport. Most of these include a cab ride or shuttle, I was led to believe.
- Do try to see Dubai.  I hear it's awesome.  Also, look out of your window as you depart, so you can see those artificial islands. One of them is supposed to look like a palm tree but looks more like a horse shoe crab.
- Don't do either of the above with the main part of your layover on a Friday morning, because you'll get nubbed for sight seeing, as I described earlier.
- Don't fly into Nairobi Kenyatta on a Friday night, because traffic is apparently the worst on Fridays. Edwin seemed to think it was from all those people going out on the town.  Saturdays are supposed to be pretty good, but I imagine Sundays would also be bad as those people that took weekend trips into or out of the city go back home.  Monday night worked out really well for Brenda and I last time.
- Do check out the Dubai airport. There are plenty of comfy seating areas (like Starbucks) that you won't get kicked out of for occupying the better part of 7 hours at even though you finished your coffee and muffin 6.5 hours earlier.  There area a tonne of duty free stores there also, and a camel's milk chocolate stand, which I will be a patron of on my way home.

Finally:
- Do not be annoyed that this post has no pictures. I didn't want to seem like a total tourist today and my camera doesn't stow easily with the lens on so I left it in my camera bag to avoid forgetting things. I already almost forgot my cellphone once, I'm trying not to lose anything on this trip!

PS: I do know exactly when I'll be coming back again, just FYI.

March Kenya Trip 3: The part where it all ended

My trip to Kenya in March ended all too quickly for me. I was having such a good time that the last few days really snuck up on me. The first few days we stayed at Ol Pejeta it seemed like we had forever to go in Kenya, and even after we'd been there fore a few days it seemed like the time was passing really slowly and we would get to stay forever. It probably didn't help that Brenda and I kept joking that we would just stay forever and forget all about our obligations back in the States.  We liked Kenya a lot.

Plains zebra (Equus quagga) were all over the plains at Ol Pejeta.  They were pretty exciting to see at first, but after a while they became a lot less exciting.  It didn't help that for some reason I kept calling them giraffe.  I got confused.  They, more than any other animals, spent their time lazing around and napping on the roads, soaking up the sun.  Almost all of them were also pretty chubby.  There were also plenty of little foals around, although there was this funny observer effect where we would think we had seen such a small adorably baby zebra until the next day (or twenty minutes later) when we would see one that was somehow even smaller!  I think the smallest one we saw wasn't much smaller than the one pictured above, who was napping on the side of the road one day as we were trolling for giraffe with Kim.  Mostly, sleepy zebra got up pretty quickly when they heard the car coming or heard their herd scampering off, but this little guy stayed asleep.  We were actually pretty worried about him when all three of us, Kim, Brenda, and I were leaning out the car window snapping pictures of him and still he wasn't moving.  We thought that he might be sick or near death and would make a quick snack for a predator.

Turns out he was just snoozin' really hard and as soon as he woke up and saw us staring at him intently it took him only a few seconds to jump up and gallop away.  He ran away so quickly and suddenly that he startled the rest of his herd and they all ran off for a little distance, until they realized that there wasn't really any danger.

Another curious thing that Brenda and I discovered, independent of Kim's education, is that Impala (Aepyceros melampus) make a really startling grunting-growling sound when they are fighting.  We discovered this one day when walking around the chimpanzee enclosure with one of the chimp caregivers, John.  As we walked through a rather thick section of brush we heard growling and both Brenda and I turned quickly, only to find John laughing at us as he told us that it was just impala.  They have a  resource-defense polygyny mating system, meaning that males defend a resource -- the females -- from other males.  The males with their harems can be pretty aggressive towards their females and we got a couple of chances to watch males aggressively chase females back into their harem.  One of the neat things about driving around with behavior nerds is that you get to stop to watch interesting or funny behaviors and nobody complains about what you're doing.  

One one of our last mornings driving with Kim we encountered a female Grant's gazelle (Nanger granti) that had just given birth.  I don't know if Grant's are usually found in herds or not, but it seems like they would be, given that they're a gazelle species.  Females are always safer in herds.  When we drove up all we could see a huge male warthog nuzzling at a package on the ground, and after we had (accidentally) driven the warthog off we could tell that the ground package was a newborn.  So newborn that the baby was still encased in the embryonic sac and was still wet.  The warthog was guarding the newborn against its mother, or so it seemed, and it wasn't until we got quite close that the hog actually ran off.  The mother then stood around vigilantly watching her surroundings, practically ignoring her newborn.  I kept accusing her of being a bad mother, but she was in a pretty vulnerable position, out in the open, right next to one of the roads.  I suspected that the warthog was attracted by the smells of the birth and was then eating the placenta and embryonic sac.  I don't think even that big of a male would have been able to kill the baby, although maybe he could have crushed its spinal cord if he tried hard enough, or kept the mother away for long enough that the baby starved to death.  Regardless, it was very interesting to see this kind of behavior when most of the people at Ol Pejeta, Kenyan born and bred, had never heard of or seen that behavior before.

We also saw a family of elephants a couple of times, once at a watering hole and once just crossing the road. I was pretty bummed that I didn't get to see them splashing water around anywhere at all, I think that would have been super awesome.  But we did get to see this cute little guy foraging on the side of the road for quite a while.  According to Kim, young elephants are usually pretty skittish from cars.  This group was seen near the research centre a bunch of times, so maybe they were more used to people driving by them and staring at them.

Our last day in Kenya we went into Nanyuki around 10:30 to do some curio shopping and go to Trout Tree restaurant for lunch.  Trout Tree was pretty awesome, the restaurant is actually in this gigantic tree.  I wasn't sure how they managed to do it until we got there, when we drove down a really steep ravine and I saw that the restaurant was supported in part by the tree and in part by the ravine.  The food there was delicious, they had a trout chowder (which I didn't order but did steal some of Kim's) that was delicious, all smoky and creamy with fresh smoked trout in it.  We also ordered a smoked trout appetizer that was really great; a whole small trout (maybe 8-9" long), served with dark wheat bread and horseradish, lemon, and arugula.  Yummmm.  For lunch I had a whole grilled trout and it was amazing.  So yum.

And the best part about the restaurant?  There were black and white colobus (Colobus guereza) so close I could practically touch them!  They are a habituated troup and were in a tree out front of the restaurant when we arrived there, about seven of them, hanging out, yawning, sprawling, being adorable.  They also jumped onto the roof of the restaurant, just a tarp, while we were eating and got chased off by the restaurant staff.  Apparently mangabeys often come down there too, but weren't there that day.

That afternoon we had a long, warm drive back to Nairobi in our express matatu, and got to wait in the airport for about six hours before our flight.  Brenda and I did some airport shopping, and then got onto our flight home.  Our flights home were really long, and Brenda and I got really cranky.  Really, really cranky.  We were hating humanity by the end of that trip.

That pretty much concludes the stories from my first trip to Kenya.  If I forgot anything I'll try to shove it in here somewhere so it makes sense.

March Kenya Trip 2: The middle-ish

I tried to start the recap of the March Kenya trip with a day-by-day blow-by-blow, but as you can see that didn't really work out.  All the days have kinda blurred together at this point so I just know when things happened by other markers, like the weather, or what we were doing that day (chimps or safari), or who was visiting the research centre.

For a few days some Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) vets were visiting, they had to knock down a lioness for treatment as well as sedate some elephants to repair their GPS collars.  The visiting vets stay at the research centre and more than doubled our numbers while they were there.  Matthew, the head vet, also had a lot to say about the black market animal trade and poachers.  He was very vehement about them, and told us some pretty horrible stories about animals he had encountered with snares caught somewhere on their body which he then had to remove.  George, the Ol Pejeta vet, also hates poachers, with a seemingly irrational passion.  However, they basically oppose everything these wildlife vets do, so I guess it's not all that irrational.

The chimp sanctuary at Ol Pejeta is pretty spectacular.  They have a 20 foot electric fence that serves both to keep chimps in and predators out.  Inside the enclosure live warthogs, bushbuck, mongoose, all the birds that choose to go in and out, as well as all the small mammals that I am sure have no problem navigating the fences.  I saw some little mammals but they were far away so I was unable to identify them, plus I didn't have a mammal ID book.  Never fear, I've brought one this time.

The chimps live in two groups, and they seem pretty happy with their social lives.  The smaller group is called "Young chimps" although they're not actually younger, just newer to the sanctuary (both groups came from a Jane Goodall Institute Sanctuary in Burundi when civil war broke out and it was no longer safe to keep the chimps there).  Both of the night houses available to the chimps are really nice, although young group's night house has bars on the ceiling so hammocks can be hung from there.  They really loved it, playing and rolling around when they came in for dinner.

In contrast, old group is much larger and their evening ritual is a bit more raucous.  With 22 chimps to bring in, give dinner, and get into their sleeping groups, you can imagine the noise that is created.  The big boys all like to let everyone know when they arrive and that makes everyone start pant-hooting again... in the concrete-walled night house, it echoes quite a bit.  For breakfast and dinner all the chimps get fresh fruit and vegetables and a corn-meal paste called ugali.  They love their ugali, and everyone got even more excited when the caregivers brought out the big plate of steaming ugali towards the end of dinner.  (I think this is akin to asking children to eat all their vegetables first before getting their dessert.)  One big male, Poco, was particularly excited for his ugali, but despised the corn he kept being given.  His eyesight is not very good due to some clouding on his retina so each time a caregiver would walk over towards him with an ear of corn Poco would get very excited, I think he thought it was ugali.  Then, when he had the corn in his hands and realised it wasn't ugali, it would throw it on the ground.  Fortunately, the boy eating with him seemed to really like corn and devoured what Poco didn't eat.

After spending a few days with the chimps -- all day, from breakfast until bedtime -- we went back out to help Kim collect her data.  Driving around with Kim is especially fun because of the opportunity to see so many cool things.  One afternoon we saw some warthogs and jackals in what appeared to be an altercation, and as we drove up everyone scattered.  It seemed that the warthogs had tried to steal the jackals' dinner, a dead Thomson's Gazelle, and one of the young warthogs was still holding a Tommy leg as he retreated!  The presence of our car really made the warthogs back off and allowed the jackals to reclaim their meal.  When we told George, the vet, and some of the chimp caregivers about this they hardly believed us, and wanted photo evidence to know that it was true.  I suspect that meat is not a large part of the warthog diet but in the dry season, as when we were there, when grazing is scarce they might rely on scavenging a bit more than they would otherwise.

We also got to see the above hyena den a few times.  There were at least three youngesters and the same red-headed female watching them each time we visited.  On our third visit we saw a few other hyenas walking up and got to see the youngsters greet the newcomer.  The newcomer must not have been very high ranking as the red-headed female didn't even bother to get up to greet him.  She just touched his nose when he came up and stayed in her den.

By far the coolest thing we saw was not when we were out driving with Kim, but when we followed the Italian documentarian one night as he and a ranger radiotracked the lions.  As we were going past the Northern White Rhino enclosure we encountered a female cheetah with four cubs, all devouring a Tommy.  The cubs were adorable, all growly and ravenous, and one of them kept overeating and having to go to the side and burp/vomit a little (I don't know if cheetahs can actually burp).  We stayed there for about forty minutes watching them, and Blair kindly lent me her 70-300 lens to take some close up photos with.  We were really lucky to see these guys, and the mother was lucky that no other big cats came up to scavenge.  I have been told that other cheetahs, but especially lions, will kill cheetah cubs as an easy meal when scavenging their kills.  Kim and Blair kept an eye on this female after I left and now she only has two cubs left, a pretty common outcome for female cheetahs, but if she keeps those two alive until adulthood she will have done a great job.

I also got to go on a pretty incredible flight with Capt. Peter Lempatu, a bush pilot staying at Ol Pejeta.  He works for the Kenya Rangeland Trust (I could be totally wrong about that), and took each of us at the research center up in his two-seater plane for a quick trip.  The flight was incredible, although I didn't think it was quite as cool as Kim did -- she was ecstatic and couldn't stop talking about flying for days.  We got to see the entirety of Ol Pejeta from the air which was super awesome, flying the entire perimeter.  I was pretty surprised how well we could see animals from the air, they weren't little brown smudges as I had expected, but pretty easy to distinguish from one another.  We flew right up until sunset, and as we pulled in to the landing we buzzed Kim, Brenda, and Blair, who were having a sundowner (drinks and watching the sun set) at the end of the airstrip.

It was April Fools' day as well, so when Kim, Brenda, and Blair were late to dinner Peter and I decided to play a little trick on them.  We hid their food in the oven and other places in the kitchen and got the cooks to go along with our plan.  When Kim, Blair, and Brenda, came back we were already eating and claimed that we thought they were having nyamachoma (barbecue) on their sundowner, despite the obvious absurdity of this.  Brenda and Blair caught on pretty quickly -- the oven has a clear door and Blair's dinner used to be kept warm in there when she knew she was coming back late -- but Kim insisted on figuring out what was going on and it was hilaaaaaaaaarious.  It really was awesome.  Then we gave them their food and we all ate.

No more for now, I finished this from Dubai, although originally it was finished in the SF airport.

March Kenya Trip 1: Days 1-4(ish)

My first trip to Kenya started early in the morning on Sunday, March 20th.  The first leg of my flight departed from Sacramento at 0830 and I met Brenda at the airport at 0730.  We flew from Sacramento to Dallas Ft Worth and had a 5 hour layover.  From there we flew to London Heathrow for a quick trip through a very confusing airport and a 3 hour layover, and then on to Nairobi Kenyatta where we arrived at 2130.  It took Brenda and I very little time to get through customs and immigration and we were greeted shortly by the Mennonite Guest House driver who took us to the guest house we were staying at for our first night in Nairobi.

The guest house was very quiet that late at night but our room was cozy and the beds comfortable.  I took a cold shower before I figured out how to turn on the hot water, and Brenda and I went to bed.  Our rest didn't last for long, however, since after 30 hours of travel we were both pretty jet lagged, and both of us work up around 0400.  I managed to go back to sleep pretty quickly -- the glory of being my mother's child -- and Brenda spent the next day talking about how amazing my ability to sleep was.  After 0730 we went to the breakfast served by the Mennonite -- some hard boiled eggs, breakfast sausages, lentils, toast, butter, jam, tea -- and chatted with some of the other guests.  We were exposed to some very interesting philosophy and drank plenty of black tea before heading back to our room to pack up before our ride to Nairobi.

At 1000 our express matatu driver picked Brenda and I up from the Mennonite, and we enjoyed some lively conversation and a four and a half hour drive up to Nanyuki.  In Nanyuki we met up with Kim, my lab mate, who has been doing research on giraffe at Ol Pejeta since January.  Kim picked us up from the Nakumatt, one of Nanyuki's first department-ish stores, and we ran some errands around town before heading to Ol Pejeta.

Ol Pejeta itself is located on the outskirts of Nanyuki, although the town comes almost all the way up to the gates of the conservancy.  The road leading up to the main gate is incredibly rutted and filled with pot holes so you drive on whatever side of the road is better paved -- unless of course there is someone coming towards you.  All the cars in Kenya are right hand drives (they drive on the left).  After getting into the conservancy we took a tiny game drive on the way to the research centre, and after arriving at the research centre and settling in a bit took another mini game drive with Blair, another researcher at Ol Pej.

The next day we got up early to try to meet with some of the research managers of the sanctuary and had some very, very brief meetings.  We arranged a meeting for the next day (or the day after? I lost track of days pretty quickly here) to see the chimpanzee sanctuary and pleased ourselves with a day of game driving with Kim as she looked for giraffe social groups. If I recall correctly this was a pretty pathetic day for us -- in about five hours of driving we saw a total of nine giraffe, two or three of which were animals we had already seen that morning.  Brenda and I oogled and oggled at the incredible wildlife and stopped Kim constantly to take photos and tried our hand at identifying some of the giraffe she works with.  She has a very logical system for identification, involving a hierarchy of important characteristics that exclude one another so any animal can belong in only one category.  A pretty incredible way to identify upwards of 150 animals that all look pretty similar (to the uneducated observer, that is!).

Our lunch was packed for us so we got to have a great picnic on a grassy plain watching antelope and zebra graze around us.

The next day we had more meetings and may even have been able to hang out with the chimps at the sanctuary a bit.  The sanctuary is pretty incredible, 250 acres of woodland forest for the chimps to live in during the day and fresh fruit and vegetables for every meal.  Most of the plants in the chimp enclosure aren't fruiting or edible for the chimps so they can't survive on what they are able to forage from their environment.  The two groups are separated by a river, and they only come into contact when they meet at the rivers' edge. They can't cross the river to get to one another, fortunately, as most of them don't know one another and they are pretty aggressive when they meet across the river.

I woke up quite early each morning, around sunrise.  In the beginning I am sure this was just the jet lag, but by the end of the trip I think I had adjusted to the time and I was just in the swing of Kenya -- it's hard to stay up late when you're going to bed early. The sun sets there around 1830 and it's tough to stay up late when it's been dark for hours and hours.  At least, that's how I felt. I don't think I stayed up much later than 2330 any night I was there.

Our fourth day we spent out doing game drives with Kim.  I got better and better at identifying giraffe, and was getting pretty pleased with myself.  I made a few misidentifications, but fortunately Kim could correct any mistakes I made pretty easily.  I also got to see the giraffe that was named after me, which I thought was pretty awesome.

The weather started to turn around this time, and we had a late afternoon thunderstorm.  Some of the storms were very brief, just rain and a bit of thunder.  One storm lasted at least 30 minutes with pouring rain and thunder lighting right above us, huge puddles formed and the ground turned to muck.  Kim's 4WD was the only thing that got us back to the research center that night, and the only thing that got us out again in the morning.  It was curious how quickly the weather changed, we'd go from beautiful and sunny in the mornings (although there was quite a bit of golden mist in the mornings as ground-fog took effect from the previous days' rain) to stormy and windy in the evenings.  Then beautiful and sunny again.

Alright, I think that concludes my first few days of travel. Next will come March Kenya Trip: The middle-ish, and March Kenya Trip: The ending.

Introduction and Orientation

Welcome to Nicole Adventures in Africa, my travel blog for my up coming field research in Kenya (and hopefully some other countries)!

The goal of this post is to provide you with all the necessary information to navigate this blog as well as give an introduction to the contents of the blog.  Don't know what you're doing or how you got here?  Keep on reading! Know what you're doing and want to get on to the adventures?  Check out the post archive to the right.  Navigation info is provided near the bottom of this post, and an introduction is below.

About Nicole
I'm Nicole Sharpe, a second year graduate student in the Animal Behavior Graduate Group at UC Davis.  I'm pursuing my PhD in animal behavior, specifically primate behavior.  I am also working with the Oakland Zoo and my colleague Darren Minier to run a behavioral observation program on their chimpanzee colony.  Through the Chimpanzee Behavioral Observations Team (ChimpBOT as we like to call it, although my recent addiction to Battlestar Galactica makes me want to put "cylon" in the name somewhere) I have had the chance to work with a whole bunch of awesome keepers and volunteers.

Nicole Adventures in Africa
In March 2011 I took a trip with my major adviser, Dr. Brenda McCowan, to Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya to check out Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary as a potential site for research.  We had an amazing time at the conservancy, and my research proposal was approved for research over the academic summer (June-September) 2011.  Since then my life has been a whirlwind of preparation and planning as I made the necessary arrangements for three months in "the field."

Ol Pejeta Conservancy is a working cattle ranch that boasts an impressive population of African wildlife, with a large population of the endangered Black Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis), four of the world's last Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni), and a great conservation program for these species and others.  They also have a magnificent chimpanzee sanctuary, with 250 acres of woodland habitat for their rescued chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to live and play in during the day, and spacious night-house facilities for the chimps' safety at night.  The sanctuary is home to 43 chimpanzees, all but four of whom were rescued from often deplorable conditions as privately owned pets, tourist attractions, or company mascots.  The last four chimps were born at the sanctuary and, although unplanned, have provided great joy to the chimps and caregivers alike.  None of the chimpanzees at Sweetwaters will ever be released into the wild; many of them have experienced serious psychological trauma (very early separation from their mothers when their wild group was killed for bushmeat or captured for black market trade) which is only compounded by the poor conditions most of these animals experienced at the hands of their former owners.  This has made them unfit for release into the wild, and Sweetwaters is their "forever" home.

My research is non-invasive and all of my data will be collected through behavioral observations of the chimpanzees as they go about their daily business.  I will be collecting data 6 days a week, Monday through Saturday, spending half of my time with each of the two groups of chimpanzees.  Sundays I will get a day to relax (ha!), do data entry, write in this blog, or ride around with my colleague Kim as she looks for giraffe (essentially a safari for me).  I am sure that the majority of my blog posts will have to do with the chimps, since I do have quite a love for primates.  And let's be honest here: monkeys (and apes) are always entertaining, especially for me.  Even more honestly: I like to talk about them, a lot.  Just ask my friends.  I am sure I will also write about the other animals that I see, the friends that I make, and all the antics I am sure to get myself into.  (Premonition: I'll fall in at least one river, get my car stuck in the mud at least once, and be forced to change my tire in the middle of the bush.  Just a couple of guesses before I actually depart.)

Stay tuned, and get ready for my awesome African adventures!

Orientation and Navigation
You can always get back to this post by hitting the "introduction" link in the Notable Posts box to the right.

Below that is the Blog Archive which will give you all of the posts that I have published in this blog, in chronological order (from newest to oldest).  I will try to make the titles somewhat informative, but if you just can't see what you're looking for in the titles, try the Search box right below that.

I will also be labeling my posts, when I remember to, and those labels will be listed in the Labels box below the Search box.  Labels are keywords of what I think is important in each post and might be a specific chimp's name, an animal that I mentioned in the post, or... probably those things will be labels.  If you're interested in all the posts that mention a certain label click on that label (very label is a link) and they'll be listed chronologically in the main post window.

Want to get all of my posts automatically?  Sign up for email updates.

If you want to get back to the most recent posts you can click the Home link at the bottom of the blogroll at any time.